Accidents involving machines such as motor vehicles, heavy equipment machinery, metal stamping equipment and the like are known to occur when an operator of the machine becomes drowsy, distracted, etc. In an attempt to anticipate motor vehicle driver drowsiness, video monitoring systems that focus on the driver and capture images of the driver's facial characteristics are known. For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0159344 discloses a system that processes three points of a driver's facial feature in order to calculate a head pose of the driver and determine their state during operation of a motor vehicle.
Other systems use facial imaging in order to determine behavior related to “road rage”, “lying”, drowsiness during monitoring of computer displays and the like. However, heretofore systems and methods have required excessive computation time and/or complex modeling of facial features in order to attempt an evaluation as to whether or not an individual is becoming or has become drowsy. As such, an improved system and/or process for rapidly detecting the drowsiness of an individual while operating a machine would be desirable.